The Design and Performance of a Pluggable Protocols Framework for Object Request Broker Middleware
Fred Kuhns · Open Scholarship Institutional Repository (Washington University in St. Louis) · 1999
To be an effective platform for performance-sensitive real-time and embedded applications, off-the-shelf CORBA middleware must preserve communication-layer quality of service (QoS) properties to applications end-to-end. However, the standard CORBA's GIOP/IIOP interoperability protocols are not well suited for applications that cannot tolerate the message footprint size, latency, and jitter associated with general-purpose messaging and transport protocols. It is essential, therefore, to develop standard pluggable protocols frameworks that allow custom messaging and transport protocols to be configured flexibly and used transparently by applications. This paper provides three contributions to research on pluggable protocols frameworks for performance-sensitive communication middleware. First, we outline the key design challenges faced by pluggable protocols developers. Second, we describe how TAO, our high-performance, real-time CORBAcompliant ORB, addresses these challenges in its plug...